The Republican Party these days is very much of two minds about the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. In fact, a considerable rift seems to have opened between the Donald Trump-led isolationist wing of the party and those who adhere to the GOP’s more traditional stance of being strong supporters of national defense and of protecting democracy in Europe.
At the recent GOP presidential debate, for instance, the position that Ukraine isn’t a vital U.S. interest was voiced by Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie lined up in favor of continued support for the Ukrainians in their battle against Russian aggression.
A similar battle is playing out in Congress, with some Republicans vehemently opposed to further aid to Ukraine, particularly among the right win Freedom Caucus in the House. Other GOPers, meanwhile, are firm in their support of Ukraine, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who recently said that “with Ukraine bravely defending its sovereignty and eroding Russia’s capacity to threaten NATO, it is not the time to ease up.”
What isn’t much discussed about this issue, however, is how it echoes a similar GOP debate more than eight decades ago, during the presidential election of 1940. That year, as Adolf Hitler was sending armies into neighboring European countries, a dispute raged over whether America should care about the war across the Atlantic.
The leading proponent at the time of having the U.S. remain neutral was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who insisted that America should let the fascists and democrats of Europe battle each other and then pursue peaceful relations with whichever side emerged victorious. Lindbergh was hardly alone in these sentiments, as his America First Committee attracted 800,000 members.
President Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, believed there was no way the United States could remain neutral while Nazi troops rolled across the European continent. The debate between isolationists and interventionists percolated into that year’s presidential race, particularly the Republican nominating contest.
Initially, the leading GOP contenders were Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and District Attorney Thomas Dewey of New York, both of whom expressed a preference for non-interventionism in Europe. Taft went so far as to suggest there was more danger of “the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there ever will be from activities of the communists or the Nazis.”
All the way up to the Republican convention that summer it seemed likely the GOP would nominate a candidate aligned with the country’s isolationist wing. But the views of Taft and Dewey caused apprehension among other, more internationalist, party members, and this led to the emergence of Wendell Willkie, one of the longest of long shots ever to win a major party presidential nomination.
Willkie was an Indiana lawyer who’d made good on Wall Street and was president of the public utility company Commonwealth and Southern. He was also a former Democrat turned critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal. But what truly set him apart from Taft and Dewey, aside from never having held elective office, was that he landed on the interventionist side in the debate over war in Europe.
Willkie said the U.S. couldn’t remain on the fence because, as he noted, Americans had an interest “in the continuation in this world of the English, French and Norwegian way of life.” Or, put another way, if Americans believed in their ideals of freedom and democracy, they couldn’t very well turn their backs on fellow democracies who were being menaced by an authoritarian regime bent on domination.
Willkie combined these internationalist views with a business background and a charismatic personality, and he rode a grassroots wave to a stunning upset at the GOP convention. Despite not having organized a campaign beforehand, Willkie saw his supporters pack the galleries at the convention and chant “We want Willkie!”
When neither Taft nor Dewey took control of the early balloting, Willkie roared from behind and won the nomination on the sixth ballot. Republicans called it “the damnedest convention that ever was.”
Willkie lost the general election that year to Roosevelt, who won an unprecedented third term with the world on the brink of war, but the GOP candidate’s stance in favor of interventionism was pivotal in helping smooth the way for some of FDR’s later foreign policies.
Roosevelt was impressed by his opponent and the two later worked together in sending Willkie on a 13-country trip around the world in 1942. Willkie served as both a representative of the United States on a diplomatic mission and as a traveler who met with everyday people on five continents. The journey led Willkie to write a bestselling book, “One World,” in which he argued that a postwar world needed to move beyond both nationalism and colonialism and towards international cooperation.
In looking back on that debate from 1940, it’s easy to be struck by parallels to some of the arguments now making the rounds among isolationist-leaning Republicans, who are similarly suggesting that the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia is of little concern to Americans.
But, just as in 1940, this isn’t simply a war between neighboring countries thousands of miles from our shores; it’s a battle between a democratic state that wants to retain its freedoms and an authoritarian state that wants to conquer it.
The calculations, of course, are considerably different today than they were eight decades ago. Today, a wrong move could put the world at risk of a war between two nuclear powers, which is why the West seems intent on making this as painful as possible for Putin’s Russia while stopping short of military intervention.
But even if the world is different today, the principles are very much the same. Does America stand on the side of democracy or of autocracy? As Willkie may have put it, does America have an interest in the continuation of the Ukrainian way of life? If that way of life means standing up for democracy and freedom, then the answer has always seemed obvious.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
(Biden-Zelenskyy photo: Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.)